God does not forbid, rather He requires us to engage in worldly occupations. He has sent us into the world in need of food and raiment, which the majority of us can only get by working for them, and has endowed us with faculties and powers which have their legitimate exercise in worldly pursuits. There can be no question that by God’s appointment man is to labour and trade, or employ himself in some way in worldly things, for sustenance and for exercise of many of his powers. And if this is so, then neither can there be any question, that it must be lawful to think in some way of the morrow, to provide what we shall need in it, to consider and plan for our employment and gain in it. It would be quite impossible to carry on many callings—more especially those which have distinctly the approval of God, as husbandry, for instance—if we might not forecast, anticipate, provide, propose, and plan. And if all this may be done, then we may and must mark out particular works and places, and specific periods of time, wherein to perform what we propose. If a husbandman may not think of the harvest, how shall he do the duties of the seed time? If the merchant may not fix on a mart nor make arrangements for sojourning there till he has disposed of his goods, nor count the number of days which the ship will require for transporting them, then how shall he know what wares to purchase? how shall he persuade himself to have anything to do with merchandise? Surely, he must take for granted—or at least he must act as if he took for granted—some certainty of time and opportunity, and so he must in one sense presume upon the future. Still, brethren, the very illustrations I have chosen tell against counting on actual certainty. The husbandman ploughs in hope and sows in hope; but knows all the time that the fowls of the air may rob him of his crop, that the needful rain or sun may be withholden from it, that the worm, and the mildew, and the blast may destroy it. The merchant freights his vessel with full knowledge—(not always without fear)—that fire or storm may cause it to be lost in the sea, or that if it reaches the place of sale, there may then be no demand for it. Each is obliged to admit contingencies; to prepare and act as if all power and all time and circumstances were in his own hands, while he knows and feels that it is far otherwise; that much may be uncontrollably against him; that he may be disappointed of all his hope. Nor does he omit altogether to provide for the contingency. He asks, “What if I should be disappointed, if my plans should fail, if the time should be prolonged or shortened against my expectation? What is to be done with the gain, if anything happens to me?” So he insures his vessel, and gives directions whither to carry, or what to do with his merchandise if aught should render it unsaleable at the proposed mart, and he makes his will! Wisely he takes into account what he calls “chance,” and therefore sobers his expectations and rules his plans by the consideration of what may happen to frustrate them! A like consideration—not of “chance,” for he does not believe in chance, but of the possible unexpected operations of God’s providence—is to sanctify the Christian’s plans and appointments, and to prevent him from becoming a worldling. He may think and say, what he will do on the morrow; he may set out on a long journey, or propose to himself a week, a month’s, a year’s, a ten years’ sojourn in some distant city; he may make ample and long preparations for buying and selling, and getting gain; he may pull down his barns (if they are not large enough) and build greater; he may entertain some thoughts of possibly enjoying, after years of toil and care, an old age of ease and happiness, and so may make provision for that happiness. He need not, and should not, be ever saying to himself, “It is of no use my undertaking this business, I may not live to carry it out.” “If I were sure of life, I would remove this and alter that, but let it be now, it must do for my poor uncertain days.” (The world would stand still, if men were to act, or refuse to act, upon such arguments as these, arguments not suggested by God.) No, brethren, whatever your calling, follow it honestly and heartily; whatever your possessions, use them, and use them so as to get the most legitimate good out of them, and do not despise the opportunities and the goods which God has given you. But consider when you propose to yourselves anything which draws by anticipation on the future, consider, I say, “What is my life? It is even a vapour that appeareth for a little time and then vanisheth away,” and qualify your scheme by saying to yourselves, “If the Lord will, I should live and do this or that.” Yes! and provide, as far as you can, lest the Lord should not will. And here, brethren, we have suggested to us another reason for admitting an “if” into our counsels, and for allowing it to have its say, and for heeding well what it suggests. The Christian is allowed, and even required to follow a worldly calling, but still he has a higher calling, which he must not neglect, which he must most regard. Life was not given him only that he might eat and drink, and take his pleasure, and grow rich, and build palaces, and be filled with knowledge, and perfected in accomplishments. These are but the lower employments of life, or its intermittent pastimes. Its business is religion—the laying hold on salvation, and following the holy service to which we are bound, wherein we are apprentices and probationers for eternal glory, and whereby we are allowed and enabled to lay up treasure in heaven—the dedication of ourselves to Christ our Saviour, to live under His rule, and by His grace; to set forth His glory in all we do; to become qualified by unlearning and renouncing what is amiss, and acquiring new tastes, and inclinations, and powers, and fashioning ourselves after His glorious image for the state to which He will call us when this life is over. “If the Lord will I should live and do this or that.” How does such a suggestion break in upon and check the presuming worldliness of the called of God! “Here am I,” it makes him exclaim, “actually laying myself out for the engrossing and long-continued pursuit of worldly ends. Yet God may cut short my life in the midst of it, and if He does, without giving me time to resume my higher calling, to repair what is out of order, to fill up what is wanting, to make my peace with Him, to become fit for death—oh, to what in that case will my folly and my sin bring me! How shall I stand before Him at His awful Advent? What account shall I render of my neglected stewardship? What will justify my presumption in His delay? What excuse my want of the wedding garment? Surely He will deal with me as with one who knew his Master’s will, yet did it not; who refused the glory which he was created, and redeemed, and sanctified to render; who has preferred Mammon to God, earth to heaven; who has contracted the worldliness from which God shrinks, and despised the holiness which alone He will accept!” It is an awakening, a sobering, a solemn suggestion. It reveals to him the anomaly, the folly, the sin, the peril of his condition, whatever the kind of worldliness which engrosses him. He a servant of Christ, a votary of religion, a worker for eternity, an heir of glory, forgetting his calling, neglecting his best hopes and interests, perverting his time and powers, and opportunities from their highest and most necessary use, to gratify self with childish pleasures, to heap up gold, to make to himself a name among the pigmies of the earth; to become admired or stared at for his appearance or accomplishments; to excel in knowledge of languages, or sciences, or history, or for any other earthly end; when not only what he seeks must soon be yielded up (even if he succeeds in getting it), but also through the seeking he must neglect all that God requires of him, and forfeit all that God offers! Oh, how silly, how sinful, how awfully hazardous the course he is pursuing!
What, then? Shall he abandon it all in terror? Shall he hate the world and flee from it? Shall he become a hermit, refusing to receive good, and to do good in his generation? Shall he give up his earthly calling, foregoing the temporal advantages which are held out to him; not exercising the powers which are entrusted to him; supposing that the God who put him into this world, and qualified him to fill a place in it, and stimulated him by pressing necessities, or by indwelling desires to seek profit or pleasure, nevertheless meant him to have nothing to do with the world; that because presently he is to die, now he ought not to live; but to drag a sad, inactive, solitary, impatient existence. Surely not! His place now is in the world, his work is in the world; he refuses God service in not exercising his worldly calling; he gives up the means of probation, and the opportunities of development and improvement in the highest powers and best graces, and disqualifies himself for heaven, if he fulfils not his destiny on earth. Let him abide in his calling; let him discharge its obligations; let him pursue its advantages, and cull its pleasures, and perform all its bidding; but throughout all, let him remember, and act upon the remembrance that he is not a mere worldling; and to keep him from being absorbed in the world, or grovelling in its pursuits, to quicken him in concern for higher responsibilities and privileges, to impress upon him that all that is of the world is temporary and fleeting, that the world is passing away from him, and he from it, let him reflect frequently and seriously, “What is my life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away;” and so let him temper the lower life (and raise himself above it), by piously resolving that its present occupations, its plans and hopes shall all be subject to the condition, “If the Lord will I should live, and do this or that.”
That we all want to be influenced by such thoughts is too evident to need proof. The very best of us are wont practically to regard this earth as our abiding home, or the only stage upon which we shall ever act a part, and earthly pursuits and pleasures as the only aims and rewards of our being. We may write “D. V.,” or say, “If the Lord will,” after every engagement, every proposed scheme. We may make our wills and set our houses in order, and purchase a burial place, and carry about a shroud, and yet forget that we have to die. Grey hairs, or enfeebled frames, and the perceptible growth within us of the seeds of mortal disease, and sick beds, and sudden deaths around us, may cause us momentary misgivings, may make us perhaps permanently a little uneasy: but still we live on, as though there were no end of life; we put off preparation for death, and for another state after death, as though we could not die till we chose to do so. Not for want of knowledge, of constant testimonies and reminders of the contrary are we thus confident (for we all know that our life is but a vapour which the heat may presently dispel, or the wind of the next moment cause to vanish), but because we do not feel ourselves to be so entirely in the hands of an Omnipotent and mysteriously exercised Providence, as to need to be constantly depending upon it, and asking of it, “If the Lord will;” and so presenting to ourselves, in all its force, the consideration that perhaps “The Lord may not will.” I speak to men, and women, and children, full of present occupations and future plans. I bid you consider your occupations and review your plans. Do you imagine that the first may be at any moment interrupted, and the last never begun to be carried out? Some of you are almost exclusively pleasure seekers; others, careless creatures of the present; others intent upon business, or profit, upon obtaining power, or knowledge, or fame; either reaping a worldly harvest now, or sowing for a future worldly harvest. Others are divided in care and desire between this life and the next. Others are in theory, and in much practice, living above this world, using it but not abusing it, in it but not of it. Put the question to yourselves, all and each of you. Do you feel your life to be such a vapour, that it is in momentary risk of vanishing away; that only if the Lord will, will it appear a little time; that possibly He may not will? You would say, “yes,” doubtless, if you were forced to answer aloud, as you sit in church, interrogated by the messenger of Christ out of the Bible, just as to a question out of the Church Catechism, you would give an answer out of the Church Catechism. But do you feel “yes”? Is it your sure and strong conviction? Do your lives say “yes”? I shall not be unjust to you, if I say that I stand in doubt of many of you; that, alas! I have no doubt of some; that your hearts do not thus respond; that your lives give a manifest contradiction.
Brethren, I am not here to accuse, but to admonish and help. Let me suggest, then, why you fail to realise such a palpable truth. It is, first, because you have an idea that the Advent is far off; and, secondly, because, as I have reminded you in so many ways lately, you shut God too much out of this present world. The first disciples, as you may see from St. Paul’s and St. Peter’s Epistles, were filled with the conviction that the Advent was very near, that the next moment might reveal it. This did not take them out of the world, for they believed that Christ would come to them in the world. Neither did it make them forsake their earthly calling, for they knew that it was in that calling that they were to serve God, and to prepare for His coming. But it caused them always to have regard to the end, and it sanctified every pursuit and plan with the thought, “The Lord may come,” and so constantly suggested the proviso, “If the Lord will.” We have no such conviction of Christ’s nearness, and therefore have little reference to it, and are faintly impressed with it. We argue, the Judgment has tarried so many years, it may therefore tarry many more. Death has so long spared us, he will not come to us yet. We shall have time to finish our present occupations, we can enter upon and execute many fresh plans. We need not raise a doubt, “If the Lord will.”
But, secondly, we shut God out of this present world. We forget that He is ever with us; that He is constantly exercising His providence over us; that He is not ignorant, or indifferent, much less distant, when we propose and proceed to execute; that it is by His exercised permission, by His actual letting us go in anger, that we fall into sin; by His inclining, and helping, and carrying us, that we think, and attempt, and perform what is good; that thus watching and caring for us, and surrounding us, He is at once the Witness, the Judge, the Rewarder of our every thought and way; that consequently, when He has tried us enough, or when we have long wearied Him, He is at hand to decide about us, and, deciding, to execute the decision. His forbearance and interference, the length of the probation, the numbers and kinds of trial, are different in different cases. He knows what is right and sufficient for each, and He applies it, and then He says, “It is enough. Thy righteousness is as length of days. Well done, good and faithful servant;” or, “It is of no use that thou shouldst be stricken any more. Thou wilt revolt more and more. The whole head is sick, and the whole heart faint. Depart from me!” And in either case the vapour is dispelled—it vanisheth away.
O for the full perception and realisation of this truth; that we are in the hands of a watching, proving, waiting, judging, visiting God. It would be hard then to do or propose anything, without immediately adding, “If the Lord will.”
Two concluding thoughts suggest themselves.
First, that life is of such different duration in different cases, because we have individual capabilities and responsibilities, and some by many trials and length of days are proved, others quickly and easily made perfect, or wholly hardened; and because a discerning, ruling God is ever at hand to close the trial at the fit moment.
Secondly, that we are individually kept uncertain of the duration of our life, to counteract the sad proneness which belongs to us, of putting off eternal interests, and following our own ways to the uttermost; to give to every moment, and every act of life, such vital importance, that we may fear to squander or pervert it; to keep us ever mindful of our latter end, and always intent upon doing the Lord’s work, and preparing ourselves for heaven; that the God at hand may never be slighted, and the world be always so loosely held, that we may easily and readily let go of it whenever the Lord will.
“Go to now, ye that say, To-day or to-morrow we will go into such a city, and continue there a year, and buy and sell, and get gain: Whereas ye know not what shall be on the morrow. For what is your life? It is even a vapour, that appeareth for a little time, and then vanisheth away. For that ye ought to say, If the Lord will, we shall live, and do this, or that.”